The New York Post writes about a new book out by Ed Boland, a wealthy gay white man who decided to leave his lucrative career in mid-life and go teach some of the neediest high school kids in the city.

It did not go well for Ed Boland.

The Post’s Maureen Callahan writes of the book:

There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.

The book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.

What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.

She goes on:

Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.

A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.

“Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work — now!” Boland says.

A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called “Thug Life 2.”

Chantay is the one who aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.

“Chantay,” he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”

The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it . . . She looked me right in the eye and screamed, ‘SUCK MY F–KIN’ D–K, MISTER.’ ”

It was Boland’s first week.

It got much worse:

Two weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110 textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms. There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, “I’m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate.” Their self-care toggled in the extreme, from girls who gave themselves pedicures in class to kids who went days without showering.

Kameron was in a league of his own. “I was genuinely afraid of him from the minute I set eyes on him,” Boland writes. After threatening to blow up the school, Kameron was suspended for a few months, and not long after his return, a hammer and a double switchblade fell out of his pockets.

The principal gave up. Kameron was expelled.

“Oh, they getting real tough around here now,” one student said. “Three hundred strikes, you out.”

He talks about the handful of good kids he was trying to help. One smart girl was desperate for her classmates to stay ignorant of her intelligence. The kids started calling her a prostitute. They got punished for that. Turned out she really was turning tricks. And then there was Nee-cole, a girl whose mother was too poor to care for her. Nee-cole’s mom was still involved in her life, and came to school once to meet with her teacher. Boland says:

She went on to explain that she had to put Nee-cole in foster care. “I love my child beyond words and am still very involved with her life,” Charlotte said. “Her education is my priority.”

After that meeting, Nee-cole’s life at school was never the same.

“Nee-cole’s mother is a HOBO,” the other kids would say. “Did you get a look at her? Mama look like a homeless clown.”

Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He ­resented “their poverty, their ­ignorance, their arrogance. ­Everything I was hoping, at first, to change.”

His colleagues gave him pep talks, reminded him to contextualize this behavior: These kids had no parents, or abusive, neglectful ones. Most lived in extreme poverty. School was all they had, and it was their only hope.

A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. “We can’t just explain away someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough ­upbringing,” he argued back. “It doesn’t do them — or us — any good.

Read the whole thing. The book is called The Battle For Room 314. According to Callahan, Ed Boland emerged from this ordeal with no real answers for how to fix it. But knowing that there are no easy answers is the beginning of wisdom.

Things Ed Boland says happened to him in that majority-minority NYC public school I have heard from teachers in other majority-minority public schools. It is a painful thing to have to face, so as a society, we don’t face it. This is what happens when the family collapses.

This is absolutely NOT a reason for whites or Asians to feel triumphalist. The forces that have undone the black family in America are making real progress with whites too. What used to be the crisis of the black family is now the crisis of the family. The Economist says that the birth rate of children outside of wedlock is soaring all over. More:

Britain is nearly there; America not far behind; France passed the milestone in 2007. As couples wait longer to marry, and fewer eventually do, the number of countries where more births are out of wedlock than in it has risen to more than 20. Rates across the OECD group of 34 mostly rich countries vary hugely, from 2% in Japan to 70% in Chile. But overall the average is 39%—more than five times what it was in 1970.

Policymakers wish they could change the trend. Unmarried parents are more likely to split up. Their children learn less in school and are more likely to be unhealthy or behave badly. It is hard to say how much of this difference is due to marriage itself, however, because unmarried parents differ a great deal from married ones. They are poorer, less well-educated and more likely to be teenagers, for example.

But efforts to persuade people who otherwise would not marry to do so have generally failed. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, says that a plethora of policies in America, from tweaking incentives in the benefits system to teaching couples how to be better domestic partners, have had little or no effect on marriage rates. Better, she says, help women to avoid unplanned pregnancies and delay childbearing at least until they finish school and are in a solid relationship, whether married or not.

There are no policy fixes for this. The destruction of traditional marriage and family, and the concomitant rise of expressive individualism as the summum bonum of public life, will lead us all eventually to Room 314.

UPDATE: Reader Matthew comments:

Now, imagine on top of all of that, that the state decides to tell a teacher in the same school with the same students who does not have a prior lucrative career to fall back on because this is their career, that their pay will be student performance-outcome based as well as your evaluations for whether you even get to keep your only job that supports your entire family. And it’s now the educators falt for not having or using the right in vogue teaching methods to apparently reach those students and make that school another Phillips Exeter. I’m not a fan of unions, but every time I hear conservatives go on and on about how unions are keeping schools from making real change I just laugh. There are teachers unions in the really nice suburban schools too that everyone wants to send there kids to and you never hear about how they are the problem. Bad teachers exist, but there is no way that schools like the one described would suddenly change if you could somehow fire every bad teacher who is supposedly being protected by the unions. You just end up with a lot of 23 year old teach for America students looking to pad there resume with a few years of teaching in an inner city and then they go on to grad school or become administrators and the classroom teacher conveyor belt just keeps churning. I’ve seen lots of these kids in public and charter schools. They are praised for putting in 15 hour days and being so committed, but no one ever mentions that this lasts for 3-4 years max, during which time they are single and 20 some years old. We all could keep that schedule in our 20s. But do you get really good long term teachers in there 30s and 40s with ties to the community and the students family’s doing this?